Kathy B. is back for her second Radio Daze installment. Here’s her hour (plus) with The Mountain-ain-ain-ain!  You can check out all of the Radio Daze pieces here.- Pete

Station: 99.5 FM KQMT
Format: Classic Rock
Type: Terrestrial (Denver, CO)
Slogan: “Ninety-nine five The Mountain, A Mountain of Classics”
Date / Time: Jan. 29th, 2010 / 12:16-1:10pm MST
Commercials: 8.5 minutes
Streaming Online? Yes (www.995themountain.com)
Hot Dude on Home Page of Web Site? Some rotating images in the upper left include Bono and the Police. I’d place all four of them in the 75th percentile of “attractive people.” But no traditional hot-looking guy.
Hot Chick? The closest thing is a Haitian relief video with Michelle Obama. Somehow I don’t think she’s on their home page as a token “hot chick.” (But yes, she is. And I’m straight.)
DJ: Mike Casey, then Robbie Knight
Favorite Song: Talking Heads — “Life During Wartime”
Least Favorite Song: I refuse to answer this on the grounds that I may incriminate myself. 🙂

Song List:
The Rolling Stones — “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”
The Eagles — “Those Shoes”
The Tubes — “She’s a Beauty”
The Ramones — “Rock & Roll High School”
Talking Heads — “Life During Wartime”
Heart — “Even It Up”
Elvis Costello — “Pump It Up”
Led Zeppelin — “The Ocean”
Queen — “Somebody to Love”
Pink Floyd — “Time”
U2 & B.B. King — “When Love Comes to Town”

Comments: I first started listening at 10:45 am, in the middle of their “Commercial-free from 9 to noon” block. As I was compiling the playlist, I realized that not only was it commercial-free, it was DJ-free as well, which made me wonder if it’s a nationally pre-programmed block that goes out to a bunch of different radio stations across the country. Granted, all of the songs were ones that most people older than 15 don’t need to have identified for them (and the more you’re over that age, the less you need them identified)*. But it made me wonder if I could pick a radio station at random from say, Duluth, look at their program list, and find the exact same block of songs in the same sequence.

So I decided to pick a different hour of programming, in the interest of fairness. At 12:16, after a five-minute block of commercials, they started their daily “Barrel of Monkeys” feature, in which listeners call in and request songs — the catch being that each song title needs to start with the last letter of the previous song title. Apparently they had ended with U2’s “New Year’s Day” the day before. The Ramones and Led Zeppelin songs were “Wild Cards” that they threw in because I guess they didn’t want too many songs beginning with the same letters so close together. Five more minutes of commercials and the “normal programming” started with Queen.

The previous hour had been cookie-cutter classic rock, so it was kind of nice to hear a few curves thrown during the request hour (it’s been a while since I heard the Tubes or a deep Eagles track). But it still kind of left me with a “meh” feeling. There wasn’t anything that I found extremely offensive, but neither was there something that made me smile just hearing it come on. It’s all kind of in that middle ground of “I don’t really like any of this all that much, but I don’t really hate it either.” On a scale of 1 to 5, everything comes in between 2.75 and 3.25.

*In case anybody’s interested, this is what was played in the hour and a half leading up to the “Barrel of Monkeys”:

Santana — “She’s Not There”
Foreigner — “Hot Blooded”
Steely Dan — “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”
The Pretenders — “I’ll Stand by You”
Genesis — “That’s All”
Jimi Hendrix — “Fire”
John Mellencamp — “Cherry Bomb”
The Police — “Spirits in the Material World”
Styx — “Fooling Yourself”
Eric Clapton — “Tears in Heaven”
Supertramp — “Bloody Well Right”
The Clash — “Should I Stay or Should I Go”
The Rolling Stones — “Beast of Burden”
The Allman Brothers — “Blue Sky”
Stevie Nicks — “Edge of Seventeen”
Talking Heads — “And She Was”
Billy Joel — “My Life”
Aerosmith — “Dream On”
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers — “Don’t Come Around Here No More”
The Cars — “Moving in Stereo”